Occupational Thoughts -

Steam is currently running a five-day-long-one-day-only sale. This is because of the American Black Friday celebration of consumerism. Due to the magic of the internet this special day has been exported around the world. It retains it’s sense of Americanism by defining it’s ‘days’ with American time (their midnight falls at about 16:00-ish here). The result of [...]

Who’s up for a round of spot the fail? I’m pretty sure this is spam so if anyone else encounters it, just leave it alone.

This morning I watched the documentary ‘Outfoxed‘ by Robert Greenwald. It’s about how Fox News in the USA is not a fair & balanced media channel, that it’s full of lies and right-wing propaganda. I didn’t really need a documentary to tell me this because I knew already but it was insightful nevertheless. Watching this comes [...]

This morning I drew up a little piece of political satire about Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill: If you don’t get the joke it’s a play on the All Your Base Are Belong To Us meme from the game Zero Wing.

As I mentioned previously I went to the local Alliance for Worker’s Liberty’s socialist-ecologist reading group on Tuesday of last week. We analyzed some of Marx’s ideas on the environment in Das Kapital Volume 1. We were specifically analyzing Marx’s idea of stoffwechsel (metabolism). I’ll explain these ideas in simple terms (something which Marx completely [...]

Last weekend I cycled out to Maplin to buy a microphone, I insisted on not buying a fuzzy desktop one so ended up with a black metal beast: It records in stereo, and produces excellently clear sound. Nobody complains that my “microphone has gone all crackly” on TF2 anymore.

This week I went to two meetings of left-wing parties, and one informal gathering of activists. This post is not about those meetings. This post is about a well-hyped but little known artist called La Roux (French for ‘the brown-haired one’). Having whored herself out to a record company she was promoted on Spotify. Originally suspicious [...]

This post is about the level “No Russian” in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In the weeks leading up to the game’s release we were puzzled why it was rated an 18, all other Call of Duty games have been rated 15 and this one didn’t look any different. This classification information from the [...]

I started my first flamewar with a tweet suggesting that the poppy appeal is propaganda. I caught this idea from an article Mark steel wrote in the Independent last week. In the 48 hours since it’s birth it has gained a full 45 comments on Facebook. My defense of my original tweet is reproduced here: It seems I’ve [...]

On Wednesday I went to a radical feminist meeting, several points were made that I totally agree with: Fashion works against women turning them into objects of consumerisation and demeaning their collective personalities by emphasising useless features such as their choice of lipstick. Raising the glass ceiling is pointless if there are many women still languishing [...]

One of the downsides of the Stop The War national  march was talking to a comrade at the SWP stall who tried to get me to join the party. This isn’t a criticism of that guy, he was just recruiting for his organisation. The SWP needs members and who better than myself who clearly believes in socialism and has [...]